Silver Birch Press Series of the Poet as Child - That's Me

Halloween Costume circa 1963, the poet

Childhood Study: Fires Late August
by Susan Rich

 Awake in the middle of the night,

 we listen to the grass crackle, to the new world of evacuate.


 Like monkeys we’d screech as the trees go pop—


 yellow candelabras, we saw and then not.

 Now danger enters our capillaries


 for the first time, the ladder trucks and sirens


 seem like small toys compared

 to the neighbor’s fire-fangled trees.


 What lit-up between us that summer—


 three sisters sleeping like barn cats, I can’t say—

 except for a time camaraderie


 warmed the souls of our feet, our robes


 remaining intact for one season—

 before it all burned away.


 SOURCE: Originally published in the author’s collection Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014).